View HBase Log Files

As part of its operation, HBase writes log files with details about configuration
settings, daemon actions, and exceptions. These log files can be useful for debugging
issues with HBase as well as for tracking performance.

If you configure your cluster to persist log files to Amazon S3, you should know that logs are
written to Amazon S3 every five minutes, so there may be a slight delay before the latest log
files are available.

To view HBase logs on the master node

You can view the current HBase logs by using SSH to connect to the master node, and
navigating to the mnt/var/log/hbase directory. These logs are
not available after the cluster is terminated unless you enable logging to Amazon S3
when the cluster is launched. For more information, see Connect to the Master Node Using SSH. After you have connected
to the master node using SSH, you can navigate to the log directory using a
command like the following:

cd mnt/var/log/hbase

To view HBase logs on Amazon S3

To access HBase logs and other cluster logs on Amazon S3, and to have them available after the
cluster ends, you must specify an Amazon S3 bucket to receive these logs when you
create the cluster. This is done using the --log-uri option. For
more information about enabling logging for your cluster, see Configure Logging and Debugging (Optional).